Finally, although Ness' work technically may not have put Capone in prison, it very well may have kept him there. In March 1932, Johnson announced a reindictment of the gang chief on Prohibition violations based on evidence found in post-trial raids. The point? With another indictment pending, Capone would not be eligible for parole.

The Internal Revenue agent

Wilson is credited with breaking the code of Capone's impounded ledgers, then tracking down the low-level gangsters who could testify to how those ledgers proved Capone made money, which was the trick. Officially, Scarface didn't have a bank account, own anything or make a dime. One of Wilson's biggest assets in that work was Edward O'Hare, a wealthy racetrack owner who was inside Capone's gang. (O'Hare's son, Butch, was the World War II pilot whose name would end up on the airport.) The senior O'Hare fed Wilson a constant stream of information, including the tip that the gangster had bribed members of the jury pool.

On Dec. 31, 1936, Wilson was named chief of the U.S. Secret Service. The headline labeled him, "Capone nemesis." He retired in 1947. He wrote or co-wrote a number of articles in the Tribune about the effort to get Capone.

The federal judge

In the end, it all came down to the judge. The U.S. attorney and the officials in Washington were willing to settle for a plea deal of 21/2 years. Capone was counting on that. And gloating about it. And Wilkerson couldn't stand it. He ignored the plea deal, embarrassing Johnson and his D.C. superiors, and forced the trial.

Wilkerson also deftly handled a crisis just as the proceedings were starting: Wilson's tip about the bribed jury. Wilkerson's solution was Solomonic but unlikely the dramatic gesture portrayed in nearly every book or movie about the trial. In those accounts, Wilkerson told the bailiff from the bench to swap his jury with that of another federal judge. But if that happened in open court, it was missed by the reporters from not only the Chicago Tribune, but also the now-defunct Chicago Daily News and Chicago Herald-Examiner . More likely, the maneuver was ordered more quietly. Significantly, the swap involved the entire jury pool, not an already impaneled jury. The news reports from that day exhaustively detail the voir dire process that must have occurred after the swap.

A week after his conviction, the gangster stood before Wilkerson for his sentencing, still hoping for the leniency many of his fellow hoodlums had received. It was not to be.

"Let the defendant step to the bar," Wilkerson said. After detailing each count and sentence, Wilkerson summed it up for the man who was once far above the law: "The result is that the aggregate sentence is 11 years and fines aggregating $50,000."